First-time Haas season '24, Hard/Hard no Mods
My son had been asking me to try this team. I was ready for a challenge and sure found one!
Some pros and cons:
Strong drivers (albeit with low development rates and low Aggression) and decent Race Engineers with good Affinity. Once the car is basically fine and Mentality boosted you can consistently score points with both drivers.
The Ferrari engine is superb but hard on ERS. By the end of the season my ERS parts were 0% and 12% per car.
Undeveloped facilities, and not getting a sponsor to increase the Factory Effectiveness capped my manufacturing at only 2 slots, which I found I could live with after scheduling new Designs efficiently, and often rushing cheaper new parts (e.g. Wings) to be ready in time for FP3.
Abysmal Tire Preservation at the start.
Toby Brown (Sporting Director) is not very good. He stats start at 70 for Training and 68 for Processes. By the end of the Season that had only increased to 76 and 72 base (Enthusiastic Mentality added +10, but this is still inadequate). My Pit Crew trained purely on Gym and let everything else degrade, and reduced the estimated Pit Stop Time from 2.791s to 2.349s by the final race, which was only good enough for P5.
If I was going to do this again I would try to immediately replace him with a better Sporting Director. The prize money difference alone between P1 and P5 is $5.1m! ($6.9m to $12m). I need that money for facility upgrades!!
Hard race mode feels like cheating, the AI just chews up its tires and parts. Mechanical problems, retirements, and Grid Penalties from new PU parts were common towards the end of the season.
How was your career in Haas?